Three local media companies, three different strategies. All three are making money. And they’re proof that understanding the market and being responsive to it are at the base of any success story. At the Borrell Associates Local Online Advertising Conference in New York City on Thursday, we heard about these different approaches to selling online media, and how the brains behind the strategy are constantly rethinking how they do business.
WBOC in Delmarva takes caution in its approach and find that works for them. Brooke Knight Warner, the general manager for WBOC Interactive, went against the stream here when it comes to mobile. “Mobile is coming up,” said Warner, “but let’s see how it all shakes out.” Warner says her team’s focus is on integrating existing resources, relying on vendors and having a sales-heavy structure. She suggests that more than half of personnel for any online venture should be sales people. Local news sites usually work in reverse – they’ll have a few staffers and maybe a fraction of a sales person, or one sales person at best.
Warner found that, when it comes to sales, relationships are everything. That’s a pretty old maxim, but for some reason local online media still struggles with it. “We brought in outside sales teams and it didn’t work,” said Warner. “We needed someone who knew how our local businesses thought. We hired from within.” WBOC goes for every local ad penny it can find: its average monthly contract is $750.
Deseret Media has long been hailed for its forward-thinking approach to digital media. The Salt Lake City-based company built its self-standing Deseret Digital Media business directly out of research with Borrell Associates. And when it came to hiring sales people, Deseret Digital Media deliberately looked outside the ranks of traditional TV and newspaper sales.
“Rather than tapping into the legacy sales market, we looked for people with digital DNA,” said Mike Petroff, Deseret Digital Media‘s VP of sales for ad products. Petroff’s more interested in people who understand the small web ad sales rather than the big TV or newspaper ad sales.
Deseret has jumped into mobile with very impressive results: mobile web traffic for KSL.com nets 13 million views per month. If that were the stats for a traditional TV website, Petroff pointed out, it would be the 25th largest TV website in the country. Again – that’s just mobile traffic. Traffic to its KSL.com site puts it second in the country for TV websites — and this is market 35. Deseret Digital Media spreads out its products as well, offering pureplays, daily deals (think Groupon), email marketing and wildly popular free classifieds.
So what about those local Groupon competitors? Is it worth it even to try to enter that already-crowded marketplace. From the experience of the folks at Houston’s KHOU, the answer is in the affirmative. Christine DiStadio Director of Digital Media at KHOU gave examples of Yollar, its Groupon alternative. Yollar is available in 16 Belo markets. DiStadio told the audience of some interesting success stories:
- A $66 deal on Yollar led to an immediate revenue bump of $13,000
- A $12 Yollar deal turned into $8,064 revenue
“Having a digitally trained company is more important than just focusing on the sellers themselves,” said Jeffrey Ulrich, the Director of Digital Sales Strategy and Training for the Cox Media Group. His team undertook a confidential survey of 1,200 of its employees to determine each person’s digital savvy.
The key to getting good, honest results? Keep things confidential. As a result, Cox Media Group was able to establish a baseline from which it could begin its training. Will the training be worth the money? Ulrich says figuring that out is pretty easy: “If we achieve just a two percent lift in sales, the training will have paid for itself.”